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Thumper will be publicly playable this Thursday, December 4th at Open Play Day, in COEX (Korea World Trade Center), Seoul. The game will be shown alongside 30 other games currently in development. The event allows developers to play test their work and receive feedback from other developers and the public. It’s free, so come and support the Korean indie scene! Here’s a trailer for the event, it includes a sneak peak of Thumper gameplay.

Visit Dead End Thrills to see a new feature on Thumper. It contains new hi-res screenshots, early concept work by Mat Brinkman, and an interview with Brian and me. In the interview, we discuss our influences, goals, and the long process of creating Thumper. It’s the most in-depth look at the game yet.

Dead End Thrills has to be the most beautiful gaming site in the world and we’re psyched to be featured — a big thanks to Duncan from DET for putting it together!

Update: you can download the slides from my talk. It will be hard to understand the content from the slides alone, but I’ll try to find an audio or video recording and post it too. My original plan was to talk about programming tools for small/mid-sized games, but I ended up talking a lot about engine design, the drawbacks of OOP, and time-management techniques. But I think these topics are all related in the end.

I’ll be speaking at the Korea Games Conference this Wednesday, November 5th at 11:40am. The conference is at the COEX Grand Ballroom in Gangnam, Seoul, and my talk is in room 102. I’ll talk about the tech behind Thumper and the lessons I’ve learned building our engine over the past five years. 와주세요!

I’m in Kyoto, on the eve of BitSummit 2014. It’s this weekend (March 7th – 9th), so stop by the Kyoto International Exhibition Hall and be among the first to play Thumper. Starting tomorrow, I’ll post some pics from the event here and on our Twitter feed. Brian and I are still scrambling to put our demo together, so I better get back to bug-fixing!

We’re asked that question often and there’s not a simple answer. It depends on what one means by “music game.” The label efficiently conveys some elements of our game, but it’s potentially misleading and limiting too.

Fortunately Dan Soldberg has skillfully navigated the increasingly complex waters of music-related gaming in an article over at Kill Screen. Of course we’re not the only developer exploring this space and this is a nice survey of some of the latest developments. It also brings some focus and clarity to how we talk about the aesthetics of “music games.” Ultimately, that’s far more important than genre labels or snappy marketing taglines.

The article includes a couple of quotes from us on Thumper.

Update! Dan has posted the full text of all the developer interviews on his blog. It’s interesting to read how these inspiring and adventurousdevelopers approach the same questions. We’re psyched to be featured alongside them.

We’ve been developing Thumper for a long time, and we’ve done a lot of experimentation along the way. To start the new year, we’ll share some footage from our early prototypes. Oftentimes game developers are shy about sharing this sort of thing for obvious marketing reasons. Early prototypes usually look rough and you don’t ever want your game to look bad. Your game will change a lot during development and showing early versions can create false impressions or expectations. But prototypes can be a fun and interesting insight into the creative process, so we’re happy to share ours!

So, with the standard caveat that these videos do not represent the final gameplay, graphics, or audio of our game, here is footage from one of our first prototypes. We developed a custom engine for Thumper and at this early stage, our renderer was limited to drawing solid lines. That limitation led to a pretty cool vector art style.

Next, a slightly more developed prototype. At this point, we were able to draw lines and solid color quads. It was the pinnacle of my programmer artistry. This prototype also shows our first experiments with path barriers and jumping.

Shorty after we made this build, I added support for drawing meshes, textures, and a basic lighting model to our engine. So Brian (the Drool artist) was able to start developing our visual style and, sadly, my promising career as a programmer-artist ended. We’ll share more of our prototypes and concept art in the coming months, but if you want a better idea of were Thumper is headed, check out our teaser trailer.

Thanks for helping spread the word everyone. It’s been great to see all the reactions, comments and feedback. Soon we’ll be sharing more about the tech, gameplay, graphics, and audio of Thumper. What are you most interested in hearing about next? Let us know in the comments.

Today, we’re psyched to released the first THUMPER “Kill CRAKHED Teaser” trailer. It contains early gameplay footage and a glimpse of CRAKHED. Of course, THUMPER is still under development, so this does not represent final quality.

This is the development blog for THUMPER, the first game by DROOL. THUMPER combines racing and rhythm elements for unique fast-paced gameplay. Find out more at the What is THUMPER? page. We’ll release our first gameplay trailer in early September 2013.

In the coming weeks, we’ll post THUMPER updates, including more screenshots and gameplay footage. We’ll also share behind-the-scenes information like concept art, early prototypes, and the technology behind the game. We look forward to hearing from you in the comments!

DROOL is a small (two person) game developer. Find out more at the About DROOL page. Our marketing efforts are low-budget and grassroots, so please like the DROOL Facebook page and share this blog.

If you’d like to receive occasional updates on THUMPER (like release dates), subscribe to our mailing list, The DROOL Report.